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Cake day: September 21st, 2024

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  • Anyone who uses Arabic-language social media has encountered this. They used to ban you for just making reference to “Al Aqsa” (Arabic name for Dome of the Rock) because their algorithm deemed it terror-related. They banned the word “shaheed” (martyr) too even though in Arabic it’s commonly used to refer to loved ones who died an untimely death, even in accidents. It’s also a name, which is hilarious because a member of their oversight board said in an interview that after they banned the word one of her coworkers named Shaheed had to explained that this was nonsense. Researchers did an experiment where they ran pages that used uncontroverdial Arabic keywords that would get censored, then do the same for Hebrew (including #death_to_arabs) which were left up and even gained traction.

    You can blame Meta to some degree, but the chief issue are US federal institutions that use notices and scare stories aimed at making risk-averse firms shut down anything deemed anti-American (which essentially means anti-Israel.) Just recently they’ve been sending FBI agents to knock on journalists’ doors if they publish the leaked Vance dossier and give them a “friendly reminder” that it may have been leaked by Iran. Even when the journalists mentioned it in their reports on the dossier.








  • This isn’t “dissent” really. To start with, the decision was made by basically Sinwar and a few of his pala. Haniyah and the political leadership were caught off guard and knew it was a totally inopportune time to attack. I talked to a political analyst who knows Khaled Meshal well and he told me that 1) the operation spiralled out of control because they met such little resistance and ran into the music rave 2) the militant leadership inside Gaza were myopic and led by a guy who had spent 22 years of his life in prison and didn’t have the full strategic picture. This was the least opportune moment possible in every way I can think of, down to who is in the White House. If it was Trump it would have at least greatly damaged US Israel relations through the partisanship factor.








  • Iran blowing up Nevatim airbase (where US shipments of bombs mostly came in) is a moral victory regardless of their reasons. Better use of their power than helping Assad treat his own citizens in a slightly-less monstrous way than what’s been done to Gaza. Reminds me a bit of when Trump struck Syrian airbases actually.

    Also a show-y, escalatory move from a morally dubious power but nevertheless was appreciated by us who actually live in this region and know people slaughtered in merciless airstrikes.